Last Friday a friend and I went Emmaüs, the big thrift store in Carmaux, an old mining town near here. All thrift stores are magical, but this one has a particularly good record.
I headed straight for the bins of old framed pictures. I was hoping to find something to hang in a niche in the bathroom. I found it, and I also found this:
It’s a framed, hand-painted postcard. The delightful Indian gentleman riding right out of the frame is Ganesh Baba, the scientific psychedelic kriya yoga guru. He appeared in my life late in 1979, intending to stay three days. Instead, he stayed in my orbit for three years, staying three days at a time, until the dream was over.
Now, he roared back into my life on a motorbike to remind me of his core message.
Ganesh Baba was the real thing. Look him up. The Wikipedia entry is good though outdated. There is a newer, much more explicit book on Ganesh Baba and his teachings available now. Written by another student of Baba’s, Keith Lowenstein, it’s called Kriya Yoga for Self-Discovery.
Baba’s essential teachings can be encapsulated into four actions. He reminded me in my meditation today is that practicing the four will get you through the hardest of times. The full system is more complex, at least eight steps if not twelve. But the first four are what’s needed today.
Posture
Hold your head high, your spine straight, rib cage open.
There’s a reason the military and the old aristocracy made the straight back essential. It changes your perspective, among many other benefits. Your spinal cord is your antenna.
Reconnect with the physical world.
Breath
Your breath is your connection to the life force. The more air you can breath in and out, the better you will feel.
Reconnect with the biological world.
Attention
Practice controlling your attention. Meditation does this particularly well, but any serious practice, spiritual, mental, or physical. can achieve it. Those who can direct their attention are better able to maneuver in worlds beyond the physical.
Reconnect with the mental/psychological world.
Mantra
Using a mantra, a sound or phrase repeated internally or aloud, is a time-tested method for changing one’s vibration. Now more than ever, the world needs humans to raise their vibration.
OM on the in breath, OM on the out breath is simple and potent.
Reconnect with the spiritual world.
That’s it, and it’s enough. Practice each one separately and do them in combination and all together. It’s efficient and effective.
In fact, it’s magic.
Eve Neuhaus 
Good advice
What a great story, Eve, of how you found this picture and what it stirred in you!
I wanted to add that another reason the military enjoins erect posture is that, while it makes the erect one feel strong, alert, and aware, it also conveys a message of confidence and power: we teach this in martial arts and self-defense training also: a person walking around clear-eyed and straight-backed is a much less likely target of aggression. Such a person can seem intimidating to a bully, a predator.
It also relieves depressive thoughts and feelings, as I think you imply.
Oh, we need all these tools in these times, thank you! Just this morning I said to John, Eve was right to get out. Mind you, the European countries, including France, have their challenges, too. So thank you for reminding us of these practical (and free!) tools to use every day.
May our voices and spirits remain strong.
Big love, ~W
Exactly! Baba always said the posture was the foundation. If you didn’t do any of the others but you kept your back straight, the others would come automatically.
Thank you for sharing this important advice that is more timely than ever in the era of the cell phone! The near-universality of these devices has vastly deteriorated individual attunement and well-being as well as collective engagement and mutual presence. Posture? On the bus, in public places, even in gatherings where people are supposedly with each other, many or most appear hunched over their devices, fiddling with them. Breath? The hunched-over posture prevents the healthy fullness of capacity to take in the blessings of what the Navajo call the Holy Wind that animates us. Even those who remain fully upright, perhaps because the phone is next to the ear in a conversation, often give the impression of distracted breathlessness. Attention? Control thereof is largely ceded to whoever is providing the “content” so conveniently carried everywhere. The notion that one can exercise such control oneself is now foreign to many; attention is “up for grabs,” and those most blatant in seizing it have degraded everything from our politics to our social relations. Mantra? The scattering of attention prevents alignment with the voice inside that can carry a mantram. A suggestion: if you belong to the vast majority who own and carry these devices (a majority to which I emphatically do not belong! It is struggle enough to cope with the impacts of second-hand cell phone from others!), it might be best to distance yourself from any such devices as much as possible before embarking on genuine engagement with the practices Ganesh Baba (who always showed up where he was meant to be without carrying any electronic device that could summon him, because he cultivated a clear channel that still exists if we can attend to it!) is so generously sharing with us!
Well-said, Eric!
Not to leave us on the fraught note of the previous message, I can report one major step in public policy promoting greater mindfulness in California, whose Legislature passed, and Governor signed, AB 1632, adding California to the ten or so states and many school districts in other states that ban cellphones from classrooms. This removal of a major obstacle to attentiveness and concentration needs to spread more widely, especially given the catastrophic mental health crisis affecting our youth. I wonder about the feasibility of further steps: are there ways to keep the common sense essence of Ganesh Baba’s practices intact while removing a context that embeds them in any particular religion, so that they can overcome the constitutional barrier between state functions and promotion of a religion? For example, are there synonyms for the word “mantra” that could keep the genuine power and spirit of the concept without the reference to a particular faith? Are any among us aware of any places, particularly in the US, where something like this is already happening? Of course, the classroom is only part of the picture, and a cell phone ban imposed on youth only adds to the allure of the technology as a coveted adult privilege unless the young people can see joyfully PRESENT adults who can model ABSTINENCE from it, and adult abstinence faces rising obstacles as those of us who refuse this addictive neurotoxic technology are methodically shut out of more and more of commerce and society. In short, the struggle to increase genuine mindfulness in a society showing dire symptoms of disconnection and vulnerability to manipulation is many-faceted, but Ganesh Baba’s sharing of paths toward effective mindfulness, and your sharing of them with us, can only help us make concrete steps in that long and ultimately hopeful struggle.
I agree, Eric. All good points. Ganesh Baba actually didn’t use the word “mantra.” He used the invented word “pronov-mentation.” But I felt the word “mantra” is understood well enough by the general public to be used.
Hello Eric ! I don’t know you but I could not agree more. I am stunned every day by the capacity of those devices (that can be very useful for all kind of reasons) to turn beautiful people into hunchbacks, and I would say with G.B. into Zombies too.
And what about “phoning”, this posture that many of our fellows humans adopt now : while being with friends or family, they cut themselves from the group, being wherever they are… But not with us.
It’s so true, isn’t it? Phones have a huge shadow side. Yet Alice Howell used to point out that the waves in the symbol for Aquarius are not water waves but air waves. The age of Aquarius is the age of electronic communication. We just haven’t got it right yet.
Thank you for sharing the Alice Howell insight about air waves! I do believe she was referring to sound waves; we can manifest the Age of Aquarius with devotional music, mindful speech, with pronav-mentation that makes respectful use of the Holy Wind. In contrast, the rising tide of electromagnetic frequencies inimical to life is a desecration, and much of it emanates from cell phones and from the mercilessly-encroaching infrastucture that supports them, now even multiplying in space thanks to co-dictator Musk’s SpaceX. Information on the harm to humans and other living beings can be found at such sites as Safe Tech International, the Cellular Phone Task Force, and the EMF Safety Network. None of us can exactly imagine how Ganesh Baba would navigate a world cluttered with these unprecedented obstacles to mindfulness, but recognizing the dire nature of such obstacles, as well as the timeless potency of genuine alignment with the life force of which Ganesh Baba was such an examplar, will help us map our way forward in this disorienting landscape.
Timely indeed, dear Eve. Thank you. Lovexx
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Your suggestions are spot on, Eve, especially in these troubling times. Mindfulness is so important. Thank you for the reminder. Love to you and Tom. Xoxo, Victoria
It’s always good to hear from you, Victoria. Hang in there.
Pronov-mentation? It does have a reassuringly secular sound to it; does it parse out to a specific meaning based on the word roots? I get the “mentation” piece of it; is the “promov” a variant on “pronoun,” or is the “pro” root related to promoting or to being pro as in in support of something, or related to professing or professions? Is the nov a contraction of nova or novel? By the way, apologies for a typo that scrambled the bill number referred to in the previous message: it is actually AB 3216!
It’s the Bengali spelling of the word “pranav” which refers to the “OM”, the sound behind all sound, the primordial sound. Ganesh Baba’s fourth practice is to listen for the OM. Listen, it’s always there.
Thank you! Makes sense! Does “pranav” align with the concept of “prana,” of which the “om” is an affirmation? The Universe SUNG into existence, and the continuing tone at the root of the life force which animates everything we think and do?
Baba taught that Pranav (or Pronov) is the sound form of U3, Ultimate Universal Unity, the name he used for God. Prana is the life force. They are closely connected.
Here’s an article that explains the connection between them better than I can: https://www.justbreathing.in/sanskrit-symbol-for-breathe/
Good evening, Eve,
Not quite sure what to make of this, but when I opened my iPad this morning, your blog greeted me. II was totally blown away. OMG have NO IDEA how as I didn’t search for it. Definitely too woo-woo for me, but you likely have an explanation…You were always an inspiration for me when we worked with the Silver Forum at Bellevue. Dan and I left SLO for Virginia at the turn of the century (!) where I finished my career as a middle school public educator. Dan passed away in the spring of 2020 just as we shut down for COVID; I retired that June.
Just purchased your Audible version of Red Vienna and will start listening tonight. Thank you for being you – gives me hope.
Leslie
lahanna@verizon.net
How funny, Leslie! Did it come by email? Maybe I still have your address from all those years ago, and I hit it by mistake when sending the blog link out? What a delight to hear from you in any case.
I’m so sorry to hear that Dan is gone. Tom and I both remember him fondly.
You kept teaching for a long time. I left Bellevue in 2001, did a master’s in the myth program at Pacifica in Santa Barbara, and have been writing off and on since then. For 14 years, Tom and I had a chocolate shop in SLO. We sold it and the house and moved to southern France in 2018. Haven’t looked back!
I hope you enjoy Red Vienna. I’m almost finished Underground, the second volume of the trilogy. Historical fiction takes forever to write because of all the research, but fortunately for me, I like the research as much as the writing – most of the time.
Best wishes in navigating these times. Come see us in France if the opportunity arises.
great timing ! missing seeing you . you have a wonderful life continuing in your new home . i’m doing well in my new little community . when i dreamed of a planned community. this wasn’t my perception and it turned out nicely after all these years . i’ll be in egypt in april and europe in october . maybe we can meet up or i can come to your magical town . plan is eastern europe or scotland / ireland . sending love , k
Blessings, Karen
Shifting health challenges to deep healing opportunities
I’m so glad things worked out the way they did for you. Please try to visit us – or I will come to where you are.
That is, if the world is anything at all the way it is now.
Sending lots of love!
It’s lovely Eve, Thank you. I was thinking of you today and wondering if your thoughts are “we got out at the right time”. And also, how much effort and energy it must have taken to make the move. I do hope you are happy with your re-settlement. I suppose having a life partner helps (and one that speaks French). I find that as much as I like being sola, making big life-changing decisions by myself seems to be more daunting as I age. Currently, and still, looking for suitable housing. I am weighing the pros and cons of buying an older mobile home in Los Osos. Part of me is excited and part of me daunted by all that it will involve and whether I am being realistic at what I can afford. And as much as I’d like to retire, if I do this, I will be working for at least the foreseeable future. I am so thankful for my Buddhist practice which helps me realize that all of this mind banter is just that. Still… I do enjoy reading your posts. Have not read the book yet but one day. Thanks for listening, Susan
Hi Susan. We haven’t looked back. Fortunately, we landed in a lively international community in a stunningly beautiful spot. Of course it would have been more difficult without Tom, but there are plenty of single expats here. We once considered buying a mobile home in Los Osos. Karen Hale is very happy there, among other friends. But if it would mean you’d never be able to retire, maybe it’s not worth it. What a world! I am so glad you have the Buddhist practice and community! Sending you lots of love and light.
So amazing! I needed to see this today! I’m so broken hearted because my beautiful son Julian passed last thursday! Cancer shut down all his systems! Feb.6th.
There are many convergences to remind me that there are no coincidences. So in that world i’ve been thinking of you all day!
Thanks Eve, Love Loretta
Oh, Loretta, how incredibly sad! I can’t think of anything worse than losing a child. I remember him when he was about ten. What a cutie. I am so sorry! Glad my story brought you a little light.